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Dojo Toolkit version 7 is now available. The widely used, mature JavaScript framework favored by enterprise shops gains more features for developer productivity. Dojo 7 targets developers building modern web apps using  TypeScript , the open source superset of JavaScript. The framework helps developers build simple static websites as well as enterprise-scale reactive web applications, said Dylan Schiemann, co-creator of Dojo and CEO of Living Specification, a startup that offers a SaaS platform for writing software specifications. Dojo is an  OpenJS Foundation  Impact Project, putting it among the largest and most mature ones hosted there. The Dojo 7 release adds more than 20 new widgets, including data-aware widgets, widgets for building column layouts and widgets for such things as cards, forms and passwords to help developers build applications faster. Overall, version 7 provides new features, bug fixes and general improvements across the framework. The Dojo team set o...

A new version of Slack is rolling out for our desktop customers, built from the ground up to be faster, more efficient, and easier to work on. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never rewrite your code from scratch, and that’s good advice. Time spent rewriting something that already works is time that won’t be spent making our customers working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. And running code knows things: hard-won knowledge gained through billions of hours of cumulative usage and tens of thousands of bug fixes. Still, software codebases have life spans. The desktop version of Slack is our oldest client, growing out of a period of rapid development and experimentation during the earliest moments of our company. During this period, we were optimizing for product-market fit and in a constant sprint to keep up with our customers as their use — and expectations — of the product grew. Today, after more than half a decade of hyper-growth, Slack is used by millio...

Despite a rocky transition from Python 2 to Python 3, developers are still flocking to the programming language. PYTHON IS ONE  of the world’s most popular programming languages. In fact, it’s more so than ever. Python climbed from third place to tie for second in the   latest ranking of programming language popularity  published by the analyst firm RedMonk. It’s the first time that a language other than JavaScript, which remains number one in the firm’s ratings, or Java, the other runner-up, has entered the top two since RedMonk started compiling its rankings in 2012. That milestone is all the more significant given a  sometimes rocky transition  from the second version of Python, which the language's developers stopped supporting this year, to the third version. RedMonk usually doesn't make much of small rankings changes, cofounder Stephen O'Grady writes in the report, but it's rare to see any sort of movement in the top tier of programming languages, whi...

The most important tool for developers is that which lets us author code: the development environment.  IDEs vs. Text Editors First, let’s establish some context. For developers of many languages, standard practice dictates the use of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). IDEs are generally heavyweight, fully-featured code editors that include things like build/compiler setup, debuggers, code analysis tools, and more. Examples of IDEs include Eclipse, Visual Studio, and XCode. By contrast, web developers have traditionally utilized text editors, which are very lightweight by comparison and have historically not shipped with many features. There exist IDEs for web dev (the most popular of which is probably  WebStorm by JetBrains ), but text editors such as Notepad++, Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text, and VS Code are still  dominant . Why VS Code? What makes VS Code special? Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is a text editor with powerful IDE-like features.  Side note: VS ...